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NYCWP's Technology Initiative Plan for 2005-2006
Purpose In order to marry online discourse with Writing Project principles and practices, we plan more integration of the Manila website and weblog publishing system, the Internet Classroom Assistant (Nicenet), and other Internet resources into NYCWP inservice work and the NYCWP Summer Invitational. Capacity building There are three types of (roles for) consultants and teachers that we would like to support so that they can help us achieve our purpose. #Teachers and consultants who want to begin writing blogs about their own professional lives. #Teachers and consultants who want to begin or continue to mnanage a blog for their study group, onsite course, or students at school. #Technology teachers/coaches/savvy individuals... who want to learn more about Writing Project approaches. Teachers as Bloggers Only a few NYCWP teachers and consultants are active bloggers. We plan to inspire, encourage, support and financially conpensate NYCWP on-site teacher consultants and other NYCWP members to beccome bloggers about their professional lives. Teachers teaching teachers is a Writing Project principle that can't be forgotten when we seek to intgrate online discourse into our work. It is important to give NYCWP consultants and teachers time to communicate, play, and learn online before they ask peers or students to do the same. Becoming a blogger involves both reading and responding to others blogs as much as writing your own. Teaching Online After one year of having Manila available for NYCWP teachers, we have only a few protypes of using Manila blogs with students. We want to foster the technical and pedagogical learning needed for more teachers to begin using Manila blogs with their students. This will include (but not be limited to) the following ways of using online discourse: *Online gallery walks *Online literature circles *Audio blogs and podcasts *Online poetry slams *Advanced Nicenet * Any other online communication projects you want to develop for your students Technology Teachers and the Writing Project We want to provide learning opportuniities for techology teachers who are unfamiliar with writing project practices. We'd like to familiarize them with our work, to help us consider the possibliites. Our plan is to ask writing project teachers to have dialogues with the technology coaches and teachers in their building, to invite these people to our September and October retreats, and to plan an invitational series of workshops to introduce personal writing and other Writing Project practices to these people in the Spring 2006. A question remains about how to attract sufficient numbers of technology teachers to the Writing Project. What could we do that would be meaningful for them? Answering this question will be the focus of our dialogues in the Fall. Who can do what Ken is willing to do: Webquests Digital Gallery Walking Willing to play with pod casting and fishbowling He's also planning to play more with Wikipedia between now and the end of the year. Also Satellite Academy will become far better place to meet Julie would be happy to talk/teach/learn more about blogs, learn about podcasting, figure out which media go best with which message, and plan for work that furthers the mission of using writing as a form of instantly published communication within the educational system. Felicia is happy to co-coordinate a technology workshop on tracking or some other not media heavy technology piece. I don't feel confident enough to lead a tech workshop on my own, but am happy to work with someone. I'm not sure how many I can do because I'm not sure of other obligations for the 2005-2006 school year. There were two guys Katherine worked with who were interested in doing tech work for us. We need to get their names and contact them. They were doing webquests and are probably doing more now. Grace wants to learn more about blogging! But I'd also be willing to work with a more tech-savvy person to "bring in" technology people who are interested in this kind of work. Kate wants to teach/learn more about blogging and podcasting. She'd love to co-coordinate some workshops or courses (and if the retreat weekend is split into ready-to-play beginners and ready-to-implement advanced, she'd love to co-lead a group for those beginners). Would love to delve into online gallery walks. Would be willing to work on documentation we eventually decide we need. Would like to do more NYCWP blogging! Patsy wants to work on research writing (I-Search, multi-genre research) using the resources of the web. Weekend Retreat Julie still has questions here: what are we planning to accomplish during the weekend retreat? Who is the retreat targeted to? (since she was not in the morning discussion, she may have missed some of this...) Felicia directs anyone who missed the morning session to see the TappedIn notes, July 11 Meeting, am - Online Discussion for information on the Retreat. Look under Workshop sessions/Format and Audience. Grace is wondering if a retreat is often used as a getting to know, get started, feel each other out forum. What if the retreat - since it is so early in the year anyway - could have a tech meets NYCWP focus. Less instructive, more exploratory? And maybe confine it to 1 or 1 and a half days. WNYCWP weekend retreats in the past have functioned like advanced institutes in a minute. Long hours within a short space of time allow for deep collaborative work. What this is should reflect the needs of participants--those just starting, those taking practices into their classrooms, and introducing techies to the NYCWP. Kate agrees with Grace that retreat should provide time and space for exploring goals/getting to know one another. But thinks maybe we need to incorporate learning into the exploration: trying out new things, discussing how media might work in our regular school lives. Fall Modules We talked quite a bit about doing severl items: "Modules" or Units on: I-Search Digital Gallery Walking/Online Gallery Walks PodCasting for Fishbowls Socratice Seminar. We want to keep in mind that we're working with both medium and content, and one should go well with the other, i.e. blogs that are specific to students' strongly felt issues (Social Studies/Community content). It might be nice to start with something like helping teachers to design a digital gallery walk. It feels very concrete and doable and can be reused and visited by others. Advertising/Recruitment Julie is already "sending out feelers" for possible recruits for the discussed "cadre" of folks who are tech savvy and whose work would be enhanced by adding Writing Project strategies and philosophy. A letter need to go out to the membership and on our listserv in late August or early fall but we need to be clear about who we are targeting. Do we want to start with novices and jsut get blogs going? Do we want to get people who are ready and whose schools have the tech capacity to do this with students or do we want both? Grace thinks that we should make some focused efforts to reach technology teachers or tech coordinators, although she is not sure of how the "roles" work in the regions. What current support is there for tech teachers and can we tap into that resource of people to recrut? Grace also thinks she may be on another planet to ask this, but risks sounding alien anyway... Since the Project dialogues with Region Directors or those other acronymed people - could we have specific conversations with them about how they view technology in their region? how might they perceive our involvement? how could we be mutually supportive? could they see their investment in the Project having a further reach into technology and therefore bolster Project presence? This may be hard to phrase in a non-judgemental way, so forgive me if it sounds bad - I think we should find a way to screen the technology participants to be sure they are genuinely interested in integrated curricula, student-centered learning etc etc. Classroom email lists in Nicenet are a resource TCs have that would be easy to use for outreach. It might be interesting to survey teachers who have taken our courses to find out their sense of tech needs for teachers are. Kate thinks the previous suggestion about screening participants for interest in student-centered learning (and other good pedagogies that hover behind WP work) is crucial when we are talking about recruiting tech people who don't come from a WP background. Kate also thinks our flyers and other materials should carefully outline what kinds of technological past experiences and backgrounds are expected or not expected for the retreat participants. Felicia would be willing to identify past technology participants and contact them personally about their interest in continuing or beginning again with technology. Return to New York City Writing Project